VMware brings cloud service to Australia

VMware has announced that its vCloud Air hybrid cloud service will be available in Australia in the first half of 2015.

VMware has announced that its vCloud Air hybrid cloud service will be available in Australia in the first half of 2015.

The service will provide enterprises with a VMware-operated hybrid cloud option that addresses local compliance and data protection concerns, the company said.

vCloud Air was launched today at VMware's vForum at Sydney's Luna Park, which had attracted 7214 registrations. It was released in the United States in August 2013 with the UK, Japan and Germany following earlier this year.

Duncan Bennet, managing director at VMware ANZ, said no customers were testing the product in Australia prior to launch next year.

VMware claims that unlike other public cloud services, vCloud Air lets organisations extend their on premise IT infrastructure seamlessly to the public cloud. New versions of the service will be rolled out every four weeks, the company said.

The resulting hybrid cloud is compatible with organisations' existing applications and enables them to build new cloud-native applications, the company claimed.

"Among organisations that have indicated that they remain tentative about public cloud adoption, they often cite complexity in two main areas as key issues: cross-platform compatibility and flexibility," said Bennet.

"Australian businesses want the ability to shift workloads between private and public clouds with no fuss, without their data being locked into one or the other."

VMware has engaged Telstra, Deloitte, Datacom, Rackspace, and Data #3 to roll out the service across Australia.

There are three core services, starting with the vCloud Air Dedicated Cloud, an isolated infrastructure-as-a-service platform with a dedicated management stack. It is suitable for hosting enterprises applications such as the SAP and Oracle platforms, email, and security services. It includes 30GHz of CPU, 120GB of RAM, 6TB of storage, and 50Mb/s of dedicated bandwidth.

The vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud is designed for organisations that want burst workloads for app development and testing for instance. It resides on shared infrastructure and includes 10GHz of CPU, 20GB of reserved memory, and 2TB of storage.

Lastly, the vCloud Air Disaster Recovery service offers a cost-effective way to place workloads in the cloud, Bennet said. It offers 10GHz of CPU standby capacity, 20GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, 10Mb/s of allocated throughput, and unlimited failover tests.

Bennet claimed that VMware supports more version of Windows than the recently launched Microsoft Azure service, and more version of Linux than Amazon Web Services' cloud offerings.